When turning on the TV, there is a good chance you'll be
able to catch a new car commercial within 30 seconds of flipping stations. It seems
like for every new model of a car that is released, there is always a revolutionary
redesign that took place to bring you what you see in front of your eyes today. In
many cases, that revolutionary redesign is nothing more than a fix for problems which
shouldn't have been present in the first revolutionary design, however there are some
cases where tweaking an existing product and marketing it as a revamped design is
truthful. When we do happen to come by such a case it is often difficult judging how
effective the improvements to the original design were, in the case of a car it's often
quite noticeable, however with a microprocessor for example, evaluating the improvements
can be a bit more complicated.

Case in point would be AMD's newly released
400MHz K6-2. Unlike previously released K6-2 processors such as the 333 and the 350
which offered only an increased clock speed over their predecessors, the K6-2 400 boasts a
"new and improved" core (sound familiar?) which supposedly improves the overall
performance of the processor, in addition to the obviously increased clock speed over the
older K6-2 350.

Before the processor's November 16
announcement at Fall Comdex '98, there was much speculation as to what the "new and
improved" core actually meant from both an engineering and a real world usage
perspective. In the end, it took a little more than a few benchmarks to reveal what
AMD worked into the K6-2 400, however the results looked quite promising.

The K6-2 400 will probably be the last K6-2
processor of the year, and therefore the last K6-2 processor to ever leave AMD's
fabrication plants as their K6-3 is planned for an early Q1 launch in 1999. It is
always a good thing to leave any situation with a memorial bang, and as the industry has
shown us time and time again, such an exit is possible. ABIT gave the old Intel
430HX chipset a just farewell with their revamped IT5H Revision 2.0, and let's see if AMD
can show the K6-2 processor a proper good-bye before it shoves off into retirement with
the revamped K6-2 400.